Top 5 Tips To Increase Click Through Rate

Firstly we need to address what is Click Through Rate. CTR determines the percentage of Click Through’s from the number of impressions you have received. The calculation for this being  No. of clicks / No. of impressions = Click through rate

1. Check your Keywords
The back bone of a PPC campaign is reliant on the keywords and how they’re grouped.

If you are trying to increase your Click Through Rate (CTR) one of the first place to look is your keywords. Many people forget this and tend to jump straight into match type changes and other more complex changes to find out that they are just restricting traffic.

Also ask yourself what CTR you expect to see? It could be that a lower CTR on a generic keyword is actually saving money by preventing irrelevant clicks.

However making sure that the keywords within your account reflect your product and services is important, as well as ensuring your keywords are relevant to your ad copy.

2. Test your ad copy

25 characters for a title and 70 for two lines of text is not a lot of space to express a clear marketing message. It is therefore important that you use these characters as effectively as possible. If you know people are searching on keywords that are relevant to your business how do you engage with them? Well again it depends on your end goal of your campaign, what are you trying to achieve? ‘Sales’ I hear you say, well high CTR does not always result in sales. So how can you influence someone who is looking to buy to click your ad? Call to actions, prices, discounts, something for nothing, best deals or unique offerings. All these elements can help catch the eye of the potential customer, distinguish you in the market and more importantly encourage someone to click. If your CTR is low and you are happy with your keywords, always check your ads.

3. Change Match Types

There are 3 variations of match types on Google and they have different jargon across Yahoo and Bing; Broad, Phase and Exact. The more refined the match type the more restrictive the exposure of your ads. So essentially less impressions and clicks may be achieved but they should be more targeted. In most cases you would expect by changing the match type from broad to phrase or exact the CTR would improve. This is down to the fact that you are eliminating some of the less relevant searches that are triggering your ad; now only the specific terms you have specified will show your ads and the relevancy is increased. However, this will prevent your from generating traffic on keywords which are relevant but not included in your account. An example of this would be as follows:

Keyword ‘hotel in Spain’ – on broad match. You may appear on ‘bad hotel in Spain’ and ‘best hotel in Spain’ or even ‘hotel with pool in Spain’

By refining the match type to exact you will prevent appearing on anything other than ‘hotel in Spain’ so traffic levels will drop but CTR will increase.

Make sure you have the most appropriate match type per keyword to achieve your end goals not just your desired CTR

4. Negative – By Match type

Negative terms will help broad and phase match keywords to be refined without eliminating the relevant searches you are matching too. Negative keywords are very important to improve CTR and prevent irrelevant traffic. In the example above we looked at a hotel scenario, as an advertiser you may not want to appear for people searching for ’bad hotel’ related keywords so by adding ‘bad’ as a broad negative term it mean that you will not appear when any search query includes ‘bad’.

However what about phrase negative and exact negatives? A great example of this is would be ‘Hotel magazine’, it is likely that you don’t want to appear on the term ‘Hotel magazine’ if you are trying to sell holidays, however by putting this as a broad match you may end up preventing yourself appearing on ‘Hotel’ related terms. So choosing Phrase or exact refines the negative in the same way as match types work. Again this is about creating a balance of CTR and relevant volume to your website.

5. Cost Per Click Bids

Finally the bid you are paying for a keyword can influence your CTR. If you appear in position 1 or 2 it is likely that you’re CTR will be much higher than position 8 or page 2. By changing your bid pricing this can help influence the position on the listings (as long as you have a good quality score). Therefore the more you pay per click the higher your CTR could potentially be.

However on the other side of the coin, if your quality score is weak then you may be paying more for higher positions without improving your CTR.

CPC changes are often the last step to take when trying to improve your CTR but can have a positive effect if managed in the right way.